With less than two months to go, it's a bit late to ask people to upgrade.

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Windows XP drops out of support on April 8. From that date it will no longer receive any fixes for security problems found in the operating system. Security researchers and hackers alike will, however, continue to find security flaws in the operating system beyond that date. It's likely that some unfixed flaws will become public almost immediately after April 8, as patches for other, supported versions of Windows—especially Windows Server 2003—will betray the existence of Windows XP bugs.

In spite of this, Windows XP remains in widespread use, be it to power your doctor's medical record system or the information displays at the airport, or be it on your parents' occasionally used but not quite retired PC. By some measures, about 30 percent of the Web-using world is on Windows XP.

Any organization with a proper IT department knows that Windows XP is on the way out. They might not all have done anything in response, perhaps hoping that Microsoft will offer an 11th-hour reprieve and support extension, or they might have decided to pay Redmond large sums of money for private support, but they do at least know that there's an issue.

The same does not appear to be true of many home users. From our perspective, Microsoft has done little to inform these Windows users that there's a problem. The company is now calling for technically minded folk—the kind who read the official Windows Experience blog—to upgrade their friends and family to Windows 8.1.

Two paths are suggested: upgrade PCs that can meet the Windows 8.1 specs, replace ones that can't.

The post also highlights the difficulties in actually doing this. There's no upgrade path from Windows XP to Windows 8.1, so the "upgrade" requires reinstalling every piece of software and restoring all data from backup—a process that's, at best, enormously tedious and time-consuming. The PC industry would no doubt love for everyone using Windows XP to buy new systems, but it's too late for that now anyway. There are too many Windows XP machines and not enough time to replace them all.

If Microsoft wanted to reach out to home users to get them to upgrade or replace Windows XP machines, the time to do so was probably two years ago, not less than two months before the operating system drops out of support. Moreover, it needed to be far more aggressive: a direct upgrade solution from Windows XP is probably a necessary evil, and some kind of "cash for clunkers" incentive scheme to replace old PCs was probably also necessary. The Windows XP situation is a mess. Extending support (as the company has done for the Security Essentials anti-malware software) isn't a solution, as it would just make the mess last even longer, with little evidence that the extra time would be used for the necessary migrations.

All we can do now is hope that nothing important using Windows XP is on the 'net, and that it'll be someone else's medical records that get compromised, not our own.

Vista, 7, and 8 are very different from XP. You could just, kinda, upgrade from XP to Vista, but XP to 7? Nope. XP to 8 is right out. Too many compatibility problems, too many settings differences, any attempt to do a straight upgrade would result in a frankenmonster machine that uses hacks and tricks to try and keep everything working the same as XP, If you want to upgrade XP to a 64-bit version of Windows then it's even worse, as so much change underneath that Microsoft has said that it simply cannot be done.

Ok, naive but serious question: is it even conceivable (and it means what I think it means, so don't even) that Microsoft could create an XP-to-Win 7 migration program that does a clean install and then re-applies as many settings as possible? Obviously some stuff simply wouldn't translate from old to new, but the migrator could flag those items and save them in a separate directory for review.

A lot of third-party stuff would probably break beyond recovery, but at least Microsoft applications could migrate.

Others may well be running Windows Embedded Standard 2009 (which is really just a custom version of XP, but actually still has extended support up until 2019).

However, ATMs are in a special category. They are likely not connected to the public internet in any way, and most certainly don't get patches on the second Tuesday of each month. There are a whole lot less vectors of attack than for your typical end-user PC.

We should be all upgraded to win7 by the end of the year. About 1/3 of them are still on XP. They all use Firefox, but frankly, I am not that worried about the XP users. With proper policies, XP business users have lots of life yet.

We buy a new computer for win7, so we upgrade once the hardware is 4 years old...if the user has an issue, which mostly, they don't.

Is there a particular reason Microsoft can't support Windows XP anymore?

Technically I would think not. But as a business case I imagine Microsoft simply wants to sell new software licenses, rather than sink resources into a brittle OS. They also need to match the competition in terms of features and ecosystem.

For enough money I'm sure one could get Microsoft to do just about anything. The question is if it's worth it.

Ok, naive but serious question: is it even conceivable (and it means what I think it means, so don't even) that Microsoft could create an XP-to-Win 7 migration program that does a clean install and then re-applies as many settings as possible? Obviously some stuff simply wouldn't translate from old to new, but the migrator could flag those items and save them in a separate directory for review.

A lot of third-party stuff would probably break beyond recovery, but at least Microsoft applications could migrate.

Or are there fundamental issues that make this a non-starter?

It could be done, but:

there's no money in it

there's already an upgrade path

large enterprises often have their own slipstreamed images with settings etc; they don't need this

Would you rather have a computer with so-and-so migrated stuff, a lot of crap under the hood and broken 3rd-party software or a clean install?

I'm not advocating such a one-step migrator, necessarily, but earlier in the thread GDwarf said it really wasn't realistic to do this in multiple steps, either.

I'm just wondering if XP turns out to become a global security nightmare (as it did before 'Longhorn' became 'Vista', and Microsoft had to halt everything to address the problems then) if Microsoft might have no alternative. Once they lose the big XP base because no one can trust it then they may never get it back.

(And they may have lost them anyway, if a significant percentage is foreign-installed or pirated software that can be replaced with free alternatives.)

We are still largely XP at work, with plans to migrate to 7 this year. It's a real issue, but we switched from IE6 to IE8 last year if anyone doesn't believe corporations are really slow to upgrade.

Known that big corporations are slow to upgrade for a long time. Thankfully, I only deal with small businesses - medium businesses (one state tops) who are more willing to upgrade and who LISTEN to me when I say that buying any piece of software that will only run on one operating system or browser version is a bad idea and they should avoid those.

Windows 7 is what every business should be on at the very least. With the speed upgrades that Windows 8.1 brings, I have a hard time not saying that everyone should upgrade/update to that.

Only problem I've seen with Windows 8.1 is that some older Windows XP games fart on Windows 8.1 because of graphics driver changes.Hopefully, GOG.com gets the messages I have sent to them and updates those games for the new OS.

I always thought that Windows 7 was suppose to be the new Windows XP, which in turn was supposed to be the new Windows 98, which was the new Windows 3.1, which was the new DOS 5.0, which was the new DOS 3.1.

But seriously, a business plan that expects the whole world to re-buy their operating system every 2 years or so is seriously flawed. I am only now getting Windows 7 on my work computer, replacing the Windows XP, and I think I would have to buy a whole new boxes to replace my parents and grandparents machine to upgraded from XP. I just don't have that kind of cash lying around. And do you know how long it takes to train parents and grandparents to use a new operating system?!?

Good luck with WIndows 8.x Microsoft, but I think there are a lot of people planning to stick with WIndows 7 for about 10 years or so.

99% off of it as of jan 1. 1 damn machine has to remain on XP due to ancient door/elevator system, but it has been banished to a set of it's own switches.

We've got quite a few chemistry acquisition servers on XP, that need to stay on that OS to drive the instruments they are connected to. The software for the instruments is XP-only.

Short of spending a million dollars on new R&D instruments, XP is here to stay.

Even worse, the data on those machines is mission-critical, so needs to be backed up properly. After a lot of consternation, we have ended up having to provision a whole separate XP VLAN to segment that traffic on its own little legacy (non-internet-connected) network.

The crazy part will be when we end up needing to replace the XP-based acquisition servers. The instruments still have a good decade of life in them, so I can imagine a poor ICT Manager here in a decade trying to track down hardware that runs XP, just to keep them chugging along.

I would suggest that you start investigating running those in a VM now. You will need to get the interments to talk to the VM's, but that is generally not a problem. Once you get the basics down and document the requirements, you will be ready for the inevitable hardware failure. It will be a lot easier replacing those old servers if you know exactly what you need well ahead of time.

I recently helped a small lab do this. 4 of the 5 instruments worked fine in a VM with little fuss. But, that 5th one was a massive pain. If they had needed to do it in an emergency, it would have cost them a huge amount of money.

99% off of it as of jan 1. 1 damn machine has to remain on XP due to ancient door/elevator system, but it has been banished to a set of it's own switches.

We've got quite a few chemistry acquisition servers on XP, that need to stay on that OS to drive the instruments they are connected to. The software for the instruments is XP-only.

Short of spending a million dollars on new R&D instruments, XP is here to stay.

Even worse, the data on those machines is mission-critical, so needs to be backed up properly. After a lot of consternation, we have ended up having to provision a whole separate XP VLAN to segment that traffic on its own little legacy (non-internet-connected) network.

The crazy part will be when we end up needing to replace the XP-based acquisition servers. The instruments still have a good decade of life in them, so I can imagine a poor ICT Manager here in a decade trying to track down hardware that runs XP, just to keep them chugging along.

It would surprise me if you're already basically out of luck on that front. Could a Haswel board run XP? I doubt it.

If I was in your ICT Managers' position, I'd be trawling ebay for spares *now*, not when it all breaks!

Technically I would think not. But as a business case I imagine Microsoft simply wants to sell new software licenses, rather than sink resources into a brittle OS.

And this is how we should be seeing it. It's not that XP is obsolete. It's that Microsoft wants money and, being a monopolist, expects revenue from nearly all upgrades.

Well, Microsoft is a business and requires a source of income in order to be profitable enough to keep its operations going. If it can't make money, then no more Windows, or patches for existing Windows machines.

XP is obsolete. It is an unfortunate situation where an implementation of an OS is just not going to scale/age well past a certain point, especially considering the large amount of bugs/exploits/etc that have run rampant through the OS.

Newer OS versions have far better security models and should age much better as a result. Windows 8.1 (despite the Metro UI), is a solid, lean OS with good security features. It is going to be a lot better for Ma & Pa type users who aren't that tech savvy. Windows 7 is still good too, just not as lean as Win 8.1. The sensible thing to do here is to upgrade. You can't expect not to sink any money into a computer if you really want to keep it working.

I always thought that Windows 7 was suppose to be the new Windows XP, which in turn was supposed to be the new Windows 98, which was the new Windows 3.1, which was the new DOS 5.0, which was the new DOS 3.1.

But seriously, a business plan that expects the whole world to re-buy their operating system every 2 years or so is seriously flawed. I am only now getting Windows 7 on my work computer, replacing the Windows XP, and I think I would have to buy a whole new boxes to replace my parents and grandparents machine to upgraded from XP. I just don't have that kind of cash lying around. And do you know how long it takes to train parents and grandparents to use a new operating system?!?

Good luck with WIndows 8.x Microsoft, but I think there are a lot of people planning to stick with WIndows 7 for about 10 years or so.

No, it is not seriously flawed considering that there are changes in graphics technology and other things. Listen to yourself.... you are basically saying that Windows 3.1 could do everything that Windows 7 or 8 does? As if!

The notion of companies selling critical equipment (like Medical or ATMs) running on Windows XP smells fishy from the start. They are selling a product that requires a component with a limited life time that is out of their control.

How does that works? Planned obsolescence? "FU I got your money already" ?

Vista, 7, and 8 are very different from XP. You could just, kinda, upgrade from XP to Vista, but XP to 7? Nope. XP to 8 is right out. Too many compatibility problems, too many settings differences, any attempt to do a straight upgrade would result in a frankenmonster machine that uses hacks and tricks to try and keep everything working the same as XP, If you want to upgrade XP to a 64-bit version of Windows then it's even worse, as so much change underneath that Microsoft has said that it simply cannot be done.

Ok, naive but serious question: is it even conceivable (and it means what I think it means, so don't even) that Microsoft could create an XP-to-Win 7 migration program that does a clean install and then re-applies as many settings as possible? Obviously some stuff simply wouldn't translate from old to new, but the migrator could flag those items and save them in a separate directory for review.

A lot of third-party stuff would probably break beyond recovery, but at least Microsoft applications could migrate.

Or are there fundamental issues that make this a non-starter?

It's possible to "upgrade" from Windows XP to Windows 7 - I did it on my computer at work.

It was a messy kludge, and resulted in the singular most twitchy Win7 box that I use - for example, when I install software, it doesn't show up on the start menu until I reboot; among other oddities.

Honestly, you do not want to upgrade. You *really* want to just do a fresh install.

Use the Migration Wizard, it's great. It will back up all your files and settings, and when you restore to your shiny new Win7 install it will give you a nice report of all the programs that were on the old machine that aren't on the new machine.

BoberzArs[sic]It would surprise me if you're already basically out of luck on that front. Could a Haswel board run XP? I doubt it.

If I was in your ICT Managers' position, I'd be trawling ebay for spares *now*, not when it all breaks!

As long as you have drivers for XP, it will be doable. But already for USB 3.0 you needed special drivers from motherboard manufacturer and a lot more can change in another decade. You will not be needing any new features though, but still risky. What if you cannot even connect your instrument to a new computer in a decade because the ports/buses/connectors are different?

99% off of it as of jan 1. 1 damn machine has to remain on XP due to ancient door/elevator system, but it has been banished to a set of it's own switches.

We've got quite a few chemistry acquisition servers on XP, that need to stay on that OS to drive the instruments they are connected to. The software for the instruments is XP-only.

Short of spending a million dollars on new R&D instruments, XP is here to stay.

Even worse, the data on those machines is mission-critical, so needs to be backed up properly. After a lot of consternation, we have ended up having to provision a whole separate XP VLAN to segment that traffic on its own little legacy (non-internet-connected) network.

The crazy part will be when we end up needing to replace the XP-based acquisition servers. The instruments still have a good decade of life in them, so I can imagine a poor ICT Manager here in a decade trying to track down hardware that runs XP, just to keep them chugging along.

It would surprise me if you're already basically out of luck on that front. Could a Haswel board run XP? I doubt it.

If I was in your ICT Managers' position, I'd be trawling ebay for spares *now*, not when it all breaks!

The question isn't whether a Haswel board could run XP, but whether XP can be made (and how much it would cost) to run on a Haswell board. (/pedant)

But yeah, some spares now, would be cheap insurance, while arranging for an exit path down the line.

But seriously, a business plan that expects the whole world to re-buy their operating system every 2 years or so is seriously flawed. I am only now getting Windows 7 on my work computer, replacing the Windows XP, and I think I would have to buy a whole new boxes to replace my parents and grandparents machine to upgraded from XP. I just don't have that kind of cash lying around.

Windows XP will be about 13 years old when they stop supporting it.

You're right, forcing everyone to update every 2 years would be bad. But they're not doing that, they waited 13 years.

And you don't have enough cash to buy a new computer every 13 years? Really? They're not very expensive. I'm sure you can pick one up on Craig's List for $80.

I always thought that Windows 7 was suppose to be the new Windows XP, which in turn was supposed to be the new Windows 98, which was the new Windows 3.1, which was the new DOS 5.0, which was the new DOS 3.1.

But seriously, a business plan that expects the whole world to re-buy their operating system every 2 years or so is seriously flawed. I am only now getting Windows 7 on my work computer, replacing the Windows XP, and I think I would have to buy a whole new boxes to replace my parents and grandparents machine to upgraded from XP. I just don't have that kind of cash lying around. And do you know how long it takes to train parents and grandparents to use a new operating system?!?

Good luck with WIndows 8.x Microsoft, but I think there are a lot of people planning to stick with WIndows 7 for about 10 years or so.

No, it is not seriously flawed considering that there are changes in graphics technology and other things. Listen to yourself.... you are basically saying that Windows 3.1 could do everything that Windows 7 or 8 does? As if!

You have sadly failed to comprehend the analogy. There were a lot of Microsoft OS releases between those that should have never seen the light of day. As a result, some operating systems saw longer and broader lives and were overall, better supported and adopted.

But seriously, a business plan that expects the whole world to re-buy their operating system every 2 years or so is seriously flawed. I am only now getting Windows 7 on my work computer, replacing the Windows XP, and I think I would have to buy a whole new boxes to replace my parents and grandparents machine to upgraded from XP. I just don't have that kind of cash lying around.

Windows XP will be about 13 years old when they stop supporting it.

You're right, forcing everyone to update every 2 years would be bad. But they're not doing that, they waited 13 years.

And you don't have enough cash to buy a new computer every 13 years? Really? They're not very expensive. I'm sure you can pick one up on Craig's List for $80.

XP was kept alive much longer than originally intended, thanks first to Linux (esp. on netbooks), then later because of Vista. I don't think we'll see a Windows OS that lasts nearly as long, again -- unless Microsoft really screws up, and has no choice.

1) there is no reasonable way an old XP computer could be upgraded to some other OS*. The reason why these computers are in place is that they cost nothing and are still working fine. And maybe that users are used to the interface, too. Investing in those computers does not make sense.

2) Sending to the bins millions of perfectly working computers is programmed obsolescence at its worse, in my opinion.

3) A new computer could seem cheap. The difficulty for private and professional users to switch to new system is the global investment needed. Investment in money for the computer, for software (remember Office is not free) and in time to install, configurate, transfer data from old computer, last but not least, learn a new interface for OS / new interfaces for various software.

4)XP licence can clearly be seen as amortized if ten years old. On the other hand, the maintenance cost per system is extremely low. I guess it in the cents per system per year. So, it seems to me it could be argued that the money paid to Microsoft years ago could clearly cover this expense.

5)Whatever happens, there will be XP systems working for years, at least for industrial system. I would say more than a decade. We are using in my company a very old, perfectly working, test system based on DOS. We are just locked into it : no money to invest in a 350k$ system.

6) And yes, as described in the article, Microsoft was extremely unprofessional in the communication around XP obsolescence. In my opinion, they are acting as a small 100 people company, not like a 100 000 employees company with litterally billions of customers.

* I personally transferred two years ago several computers to different flavors of Ubuntu. Although the process is surprisingly easy, and a good solution for some individuals, I do not think this is a solution for the general public. One of the advantage is that you can keep in parallel the old XP, "case of".

I always thought that Windows 7 was suppose to be the new Windows XP, which in turn was supposed to be the new Windows 98, which was the new Windows 3.1, which was the new DOS 5.0, which was the new DOS 3.1.

But seriously, a business plan that expects the whole world to re-buy their operating system every 2 years or so is seriously flawed. I am only now getting Windows 7 on my work computer, replacing the Windows XP, and I think I would have to buy a whole new boxes to replace my parents and grandparents machine to upgraded from XP. I just don't have that kind of cash lying around. And do you know how long it takes to train parents and grandparents to use a new operating system?!?

Good luck with WIndows 8.x Microsoft, but I think there are a lot of people planning to stick with WIndows 7 for about 10 years or so.

No, it is not seriously flawed considering that there are changes in graphics technology and other things. Listen to yourself.... you are basically saying that Windows 3.1 could do everything that Windows 7 or 8 does? As if!

You have sadly failed to comprehend the analogy. There were a lot of Microsoft OS releases between those that should have never seen the light of day. As a result, some operating systems saw longer and broader lives and were overall, better supported and adopted.

Again, bull. In each release are some mistakes and some good things.... you cannot get the good without going through the bad.

Really, I've used ALL Windows OS's since Windows 3.11. NONE of them have been as 'bad' as some people try to make them out to be. Not Windows 98, not Windows ME, not Vista. They all worked very well IF manufacturers put out updated drivers for them.

Which was the biggest issue for Windows Vista. The manufacturers kept on saying "Vista will never come out, we do not have to make drivers for it!" so when it did come out, they were caught with their pants down and tried to deflect their responsibility back towards Microsoft.

But seriously, a business plan that expects the whole world to re-buy their operating system every 2 years or so is seriously flawed. I am only now getting Windows 7 on my work computer, replacing the Windows XP, and I think I would have to buy a whole new boxes to replace my parents and grandparents machine to upgraded from XP. I just don't have that kind of cash lying around.

Windows XP will be about 13 years old when they stop supporting it.

You're right, forcing everyone to update every 2 years would be bad. But they're not doing that, they waited 13 years.

And you don't have enough cash to buy a new computer every 13 years? Really? They're not very expensive. I'm sure you can pick one up on Craig's List for $80.

Well, I can buy a new computer every few years or so, and the parents get the hand-me-down. But the last previous one had a processor meltdown, and it just wasn't worth getting a new one. As they really don't need one with a lot of power, I was possibly thinking of just getting one of those new small box computers and mounting it to the back of the monitor.

Technically I would think not. But as a business case I imagine Microsoft simply wants to sell new software licenses, rather than sink resources into a brittle OS.

And this is how we should be seeing it. It's not that XP is obsolete. It's that Microsoft wants money and, being a monopolist, expects revenue from nearly all upgrades.

No... it's that Microsoft is not willing to spend tens of millions of dollars each year paying their programming team to make sure all their software (eg, antivirus) is still functioning on XP.

Every time they do anything, even a single line of code changed, they have to make sure that change doesn't break on a wide variety of different hardware running Windows XP with different configurations. A single 5 minute code change needs *weeks* of testing on XP. They're not going to do that anymore starting in a couple of months from today.

Well, Microsoft is a business and requires a source of income in order to be profitable enough to keep its operations going. If it can't make money, then no more Windows, or patches for existing Windows machines.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Microsoft is far from unprofitable, so there's no reason to believe that they won't be able to keep their operations going if they keep supporting XP. And they should make money by making new OSes more appealing and the upgrade process easier, not by making the old OS insecure.

I do not see how taking losses on XP, even only a few million dollars, will be okayed by the board and shareholders. Technically they are not making their product more insecure. Rather, it was an insecure product to begin with. Unfortunately this is 'standard' for software, critical bugs keep surfacing later that need to be patched (though some programs/operating systems are much more secure than others).

Well, Microsoft is a business and requires a source of income in order to be profitable enough to keep its operations going. If it can't make money, then no more Windows, or patches for existing Windows machines.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Microsoft is far from unprofitable, so there's no reason to believe that they won't be able to keep their operations going if they keep supporting XP. And they should make money by making new OSes more appealing and the upgrade process easier, not by making the old OS insecure.

The old OS becomes insecure by people finding flaws in it, not by Microsoft pressing some switch. For Microsoft, it is no longer profitable or sensible to keep supporting a 13 year old OS that is becoming increasingly leaky. They have better systems in out there and want people to be making use of them, allowing their programmers to devote more time on 'nicer things' instead of trying to make their software work on older systems.

For example, at work, we don't even support IE7. Technically, we don't support IE9 now, but we generally make our websites work to IE8 at the minimum. But we no longer test in XP as we don't have XP machines in the office. Testing for that incurs additional cost to our clients. Not only that, but XP lacks modern SSL suites for IE, meaning the only secure cipher currently available for XP users is 3DES, as RC4 is broken. You can't even use AES for IE XP versions, unless you use Firefox or Chrome. That is how out of date XP is.

It just makes no sense to keep something alive longer than it needs to be.

Vista, 7, and 8 are very different from XP. You could just, kinda, upgrade from XP to Vista, but XP to 7? Nope. XP to 8 is right out. Too many compatibility problems, too many settings differences, any attempt to do a straight upgrade would result in a frankenmonster machine that uses hacks and tricks to try and keep everything working the same as XP, If you want to upgrade XP to a 64-bit version of Windows then it's even worse, as so much change underneath that Microsoft has said that it simply cannot be done.

Ok, naive but serious question: is it even conceivable (and it means what I think it means, so don't even) that Microsoft could create an XP-to-Win 7 migration program that does a clean install and then re-applies as many settings as possible? Obviously some stuff simply wouldn't translate from old to new, but the migrator could flag those items and save them in a separate directory for review.

A lot of third-party stuff would probably break beyond recovery, but at least Microsoft applications could migrate.

Or are there fundamental issues that make this a non-starter?

If you're upgrading to the x64 versions of 7 or 8 (and you probably should be) then it's a non-starter.

If you're going to a 32-bit version then it's probably possible, but I'm not expert enough to say. I do know that if you only transferred settings that had the same meaning in both versions (so, identical registry entries and such) that you'd not be transferring very much, and that any other kind of transfer involves guesswork and kludges on the upgrader's part. Could it be done? Probably. But I'd bet a fair amount of money you'd be considerably better off doing a clean install of everything.

Forget Microsoft's advice. If you really want them to continue be your friends, evaluate what their needs at present are. They may not need a desktop with windows, a tablet might suffice. Give them options. They might like an iPad maybe. Let them know there are simpler ways to get some of their oft used things done.

If they are users who do mouse+kb intensive work suggest them a Macbook Air or an Ubuntu laptop. It will be simple to follow up with tech. support on those.

If they call themselves power users etc. then they probably wouldn't be calling you for help. They will be enjoying backing up their data. reading all MS upgrades docs and will be clicking buttons all night feeling very powerful ....

I always thought that Windows 7 was suppose to be the new Windows XP, which in turn was supposed to be the new Windows 98, which was the new Windows 3.1, which was the new DOS 5.0, which was the new DOS 3.1.

But seriously, a business plan that expects the whole world to re-buy their operating system every 2 years or so is seriously flawed. I am only now getting Windows 7 on my work computer, replacing the Windows XP, and I think I would have to buy a whole new boxes to replace my parents and grandparents machine to upgraded from XP. I just don't have that kind of cash lying around. And do you know how long it takes to train parents and grandparents to use a new operating system?!?

Good luck with WIndows 8.x Microsoft, but I think there are a lot of people planning to stick with WIndows 7 for about 10 years or so.

No, it is not seriously flawed considering that there are changes in graphics technology and other things. Listen to yourself.... you are basically saying that Windows 3.1 could do everything that Windows 7 or 8 does? As if!

You have sadly failed to comprehend the analogy. There were a lot of Microsoft OS releases between those that should have never seen the light of day. As a result, some operating systems saw longer and broader lives and were overall, better supported and adopted.

Again, bull. In each release are some mistakes and some good things.... you cannot get the good without going through the bad.

Really, I've used ALL Windows OS's since Windows 3.11. NONE of them have been as 'bad' as some people try to make them out to be. Not Windows 98, not Windows ME, not Vista. They all worked very well IF manufacturers put out updated drivers for them.

Which was the biggest issue for Windows Vista. The manufacturers kept on saying "Vista will never come out, we do not have to make drivers for it!" so when it did come out, they were caught with their pants down and tried to deflect their responsibility back towards Microsoft.

I really have no idea what point your trying to make. I have always waited a year or two after Microsoft released a new OS, and it has been clear to me that some OSes were winners and had a good coat of polish on them, and others were losers and were still rough around the edges. I have skipped entire OS releases and never had a problem for it, and probably saved myself more than a few headaches.